AI CEOs Joint Letter to Congress: Synthetic DNA Orders Must Be Screened as AI Outpaces PhD Virologists

[Sharp Scholar]

Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Mustafa Suleiman of Microsoft AI co-signed an open letter to Congress on June 4 urging mandatory screening and recordkeeping for synthetic DNA and RNA orders. The letter argues that AI now outperforms PhD-level virologists on many technical laboratory questions, eroding the knowledge barriers that have historically kept biological weapons inaccessible to non-state actors. The letter supports S.3741, the Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act of 2026, which would require the Commerce Department to mandate order screening and recordkeeping at DNA synthesis vendors.

The unusual nature of this letter is hard to overstate. The four CEOs who signed it lead the companies building the most capable AI systems in the world, and they are telling Congress that those systems have become dangerous enough to require legislative intervention specifically in the biosecurity domain. Additional signatories include Meta's Chief AI Officer, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Nobel laureate David Baker and executives from DNA synthesis companies including Twist Bioscience and Ansa Biotechnologies, which would themselves be regulated by the proposed law.

The biosecurity angle intersects with the Mythos 5 ban story in an important way. The government's concern about Mythos was partly about cybersecurity capability, but Fable 5 launched with explicit safeguards for cybersecurity and biology categories that route those queries to Opus 4.8 instead of the frontier model. The CEOs are essentially acknowledging in this letter that those categories are genuinely dangerous enough that legislation, not just voluntary safeguards, is warranted.

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